New Jordan Peterson Video

I doubt that there is a more important thinker in the English-speaking world today, which is reason enough to have a look at his latest talk. But there are more reasons than that. This talk, just posted yesterday, is given in connection with his new role as Chancellor of Ralston College and takes place in the ancient site of Ephesus in what is now Turkey. He untangles so many of the profound problems underlying not only our aesthetic conflicts, but also ones of a broader social nature dealing with justice, science, value and so on. I recommend you have a listen. YouTube these days is polluted with so many Peterson clips, many of them of questionable value as they are ripped from their original context, but this one is a well-organized and well-delivered presentation of some very important ideas and principles.

The Humor of Jordan Peterson

I have mentioned him here before, perhaps too much! But I find his YouTube videos quite interesting. And occasionally really funny. One example: "You bloody well know the apocalypse is close when 350,000 people around the world watch a Canadian Senate hearing!" Well, of course, it was because Dr. Peterson was testifying. That comes just after the 30 minute mark in this clip:

Then there was the very intense talk he gave in which he spoke about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, referring to his massive book on the work camps under Stalin, The Gulag Archipelago. He mentions that it is out of print (actually it seems to be back in print, probably because of Peterson, who refers to it often) and a few minutes later, after describing it as a 2,000 page book screaming in outrage at the treatment of political prisoners, he interrupts himself to say, "No bloody wonder it's out of print!" This comes around the 26:30 mark in this clip, but you should start watching at the 25:40 mark:

One of his funniest moments was when he was describing the typical sexual fantasies of men vs women. You have to the watch the whole clip because it is all funny, but the best part is when he lists the five male characters that Google engineers discovered were the most important in female pornography. Just after the 4 minute mark in this clip:

Art, Life and Jordan Peterson

Here is another post inspired by Jordan Peterson, for which I make no apology whatsoever! He has quickly become a world-famous thinker for very good reasons. This shocks the hell out of me because he was born about twenty miles away from where I was born, in the frigid wastelands of Northern Alberta, Canada.

There are likely many reasons why the thinking of Peterson is becoming so well known. Probably the most fundamental is that he has tapped into a lot of the perennial wisdom of the West, from the Bible to Socrates to Nietzsche to Jung to modern clinical research, and made a great deal of sense of it. This immediately sets him apart from the crowd because he is rejecting the Long March through the institutions of Gramsci and the other neo-Marxists that seems to have taken over so many universities. The other thing that makes him stand out from the crowd is that he stands up, very courageously, for what he believes to be true. This makes him almost unique among contemporary academics and administrators who seem to recoil in cowardice whenever the mob rises up.

Watching a talk or lecture by Peterson is a pretty bracing experience which is why they seem to always sell out. Here is an excerpt I ran across the other day in which he talks about the importance of art to your life, and why the great bank of cultural capital represented by great art and architecture is why millions upon millions of people visit France, Spain and Italy every year. This is worth incalculable amounts to their economies, but, sadly, the artists themselves almost never are able to monetize their own creativity. This little excerpt is only twelve minutes long:

He has some ferocious criticism of the place of art in Canada tucked in the middle there. Every arts administrator and bureaucrat in Canada needs to watch this, stat! Because one of the real problems with art in Canada is that while everyone goes around pretending to appreciate art and beauty, the reality is that it makes us really uncomfortable so we prefer to ignore it. This explains why, in Canada, arts and cultural "leadership" is thought to be in the hands of the faceless, grey nonentities that administer arts organizations. Isn't that an interesting delusion! For more on that see this post: Cultural Leadership in Canada.

Honestly, there is more genuine wisdom in this little excerpt about the arts, society, life and, yes, punk rock, than you normally run into in entire books and university courses. One tiny insight from the excerpt: "art is a window on the transcendent." Yep.

Do we need an envoi? Don't see why not. This is Messiaen's Turangalîla Symphonie:

Ordering Chaos

I'm on the last chapter of the new book by Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (currently the number one selling in non-fiction at Amazon) and I wanted to reflect on it a bit as I think that his ideas are of value not only to creative personalities like musicians, but to pretty well everyone. I am rather surprised to hear myself saying that because not only have I been disdainful of anything smacking of a self-help book for a few decades now, but about twenty-five years ago I categorically rejected modern psychology (meaning, since Freud) as a whole.

I see now that these rejections were actually part of a long-term psychological process in which I was integrating my personality. Peterson's work is based on decades of research in clinical psychology and on an intellectual quadrivium consisting of Nietzsche, Freud, Jung and Solzhenitsyn, all of whom I read decades ago. There was a time when I would have characterized myself as a Jungian. I think that I rejected psychology sometime in the 90s because it seemed more and more feminized to me (though I didn't understand this at the time) and what I needed was not more influence from the feminine side, but rather to integrate my masculine side. I guess my masculine side was a bit repressed because of my odd biography. I came out of a near-pioneer society, northern Canada in the 50s, but due to my nature being oriented towards aesthetics and intellectual pursuits, I had to pretty much reject my native culture. This process accelerated in the 70s as I became a university student enrolled in music. It was only much later, in the 90s, as I said, that I realized that I was rather out of balance. As part of integrating my masculine side, I took up weightlifting and kick-boxing (no, really!).

Ironically, it is only quite recently, as I have been reading Peterson and watching his numerous YouTube videos that I have realized what my psychological project has been over a few decades. I say ironically because he is a psychologist and psychology is pretty much the last place I would think of to look for wisdom of any kind. But Peterson, like myself a native of northern Alberta and, also like myself, an alumnus of McGill University in Montreal, has an astonishing amount of wisdom to convey. So I heartily recommend his book as a unique source of practical wisdom. Don't be put off by his seemingly whimsical chapter headings. The penultimate chapter, for example, is titled "Do Not Bother Children When They Are Skateboarding." The chapter starts with a little tribute to skateboarders using the concrete steps and tubular handrails outside Sydney Smith Hall at the University of Toronto to execute daring stunts. This leads to observations about anti-skateboarding devices installed nearby that are both aesthetically and socially ugly and further to observations about the hidden nature of socialism and how it is based on hatred and resentment. This leads to an analysis of the anti-humanist foundations of such self-appointed judges of the human race as radical environmentalists. This leads back to a discussion of how horribly mistreated boys are in our educational systems which have become profoundly feminized. By the way, neither myself nor Peterson have anything against women, quite the contrary, but trying to make boys into girls is very wrong-headed indeed.

Peterson's arguments are buttressed in three ways, typically. He takes ideas from people like Nietzsche and Jung, supports them with clinical psychological research and brings them home with personal anecdotes from his own life and professional practice. That is a pretty strong approach, especially when you consider how most of the ideas he criticizes are based on little more than simple assertion with no real evidence for (and a great deal against). Makes you wonder how the received wisdom of our intellectual betters got so very badly screwed up.

Let me give an extended quote to give you a sense of his arguments:

I have seen university students, particularly those in the humanities, suffer genuine declines in their mental health from being philosophically berated by such defenders of the planet for their existence as members of the human species. It’s worse, I think, for young men. As privileged beneficiaries of the patriarchy, their accomplishments are considered unearned. As possible adherents of rape culture, they’re sexually suspect. Their ambitions make them plunderers of the planet. They’re not welcome. At the junior high, high school and university level, they’re falling behind educationally. When my son was fourteen, we discussed his grades. He was doing very well, he said, matter-of-factly, for a boy. I inquired further. Everyone knew, he said, that girls do better in school than boys. His intonation indicated surprise at my ignorance of something so self-evident. While writing this, I received the latest edition of The Economist. The cover story? “The Weaker Sex”— meaning males. In modern universities women now make up more than 50 percent of the students in more than two-thirds of all disciplines. Boys are suffering, in the modern world. They are more disobedient— negatively— or more independent— positively— than girls, and they suffer for this, throughout their pre-university educational career. They are less agreeable (agreeableness being a personality trait associated with compassion, empathy and avoidance of conflict) and less susceptible to anxiety and depression, 172 at least after both sexes hit puberty. 173 Boys’ interests tilt towards things; girls’ interests tilt towards people. 174 Strikingly, these differences, strongly influenced by biological factors, are most pronounced in the Scandinavian societies where gender-equality has been pushed hardest: this is the opposite of what would be expected by those who insist, ever more loudly, that gender is a social construct. It isn’t. This isn’t a debate. The data are in. 175 [The numbers are footnotes to scholarly research and yes, he is correct, the data are in.]

Peterson, Jordan B.. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Kindle Locations 5450-5467). Random House of Canada. Kindle Edition.

This is just part of the chapter; he goes on to give a plausible analysis of how hierarchies are always inherent in all cultures and can only be eliminated if you eliminate the concept of value itself. This is what neo-Marxists like Derrida in fact did and the result is a view of society in which all relationships are based on nothing but power. Peterson details just how destructive this is. He even draws in Jungian analyses of myths and fairy tales to critique some of the myths of feminism. This one chapter probably has more careful and well-founded analysis of the dysfunctions of our culture than whole university humanities departments based instead on neo-Marxist ideology.

Bringing this back to music, in part, my own evolution as a composer has been helped a great deal by my exposure to Peterson's work because what I needed was to allow myself to voyage into the ocean of chaos that surrounds all of our human culture. Peterson believes that artists are people who take on these explorations and piecemeal integrate bits of chaos into order. Music is organized sound, after all. But where do new musical ideas come from? Nowhere else but the vast depths of infinity that surround all of our little camps of humanity.

As a little envoi to this odd post, let me put up a clip I have had here before. This is a piece I wrote around 1980. The recording dates from 1990 with myself conducting an orchestra of ten guitars. The piece is in a kind of moment form with the performers having a choice of various moments as they move through the levels of the piece. The conductor structures the piece on the fly by choosing when to move to a different level and also by indicating particular levels to particular performers. The opening gesture, a kind of "snare-drum" effect created by crossing two bass strings over one another, recurs throughout the piece, always threatening to return to the original chaos. But in the end a bit of heterophonous melody persists. This and two other pieces for guitar orchestra were published by Guitarissimo of Stockholm, Sweden.

There's No Difference Between Writing and Thinking

You may have noticed that I pay a lot of attention to videos from Jordan Peterson, the psychology professor from the University of Toronto that has Canada all a-twitter. I'm not the only one! I just ran across a very interesting little video about how to learn critical thinking:

Around the 1:30 mark he says "there is no difference between [writing] and thinking." He says that to highlight the importance of teaching people to write. If you are cynical, as I am, you might think that universities do not spend much time teaching people to write simply because they do NOT want them to learn how to think critically. But never mind!

I had a couple of lucky things that helped me learn how to write. Apart from a lifetime of doing a lot of reading--I don't actually recall when and how I learned how to read, all I know is that when I first went to school in Grade One, I already knew how to read--one thing that helped a lot was my first year English course at university. We had to sit an exam that basically just tested whether we could write a simple essay or not. I passed so I was assigned to a literature course rather than a remedial course. The professor was head of graduate studies so a very competent person and we also were taught by his assistant, a grad student in English. There were fifteen people in the class!! I'm sure that never happens these days--first year English? Anyway, we were taught how to write a research essay and studied poetry both reading and writing it. Good course.

The other thing that helped my writing was getting into the habit of sending letters to the Globe and Mail when I lived in Canada. I would send about one a week and got perhaps one in four published! It is not that easy. You have to pick a topic of general interest and you have to very succinctly express an opinion that will also be of interest. I got so I could tell when I hit the nail on the head. Nowadays I read a lot of stuff on the Internet and I see that one of the main problems is that people do not know how to be concise and succinct. One of the best possible writing exercise is to try and express your point of view in as few words as possible.

But I have one observation about the Peterson quote (which also does duty as my headline). You can think in words, yes, of course, but you can also think in music. Music is a form, a very odd form to be sure, but a form nonetheless, of thought.

A philosophical friend of mine gave me a present many years ago of an Oxford Dictionary in which he had inscribed the comment "For when riffs threaten to replace ideas." He meant musical riffs. But of course, musical riffs or motifs or whatever, cannot replace ideas. But they are another form of thought.

When I am playing or listening to music, I am following a train of thought that is entirely (unless there are lyrics) non-verbal. There is a narrative, a logic, an expression there that is simply on another plane from verbal thought.

Let's have an example. This is the String Quartet No. 8 by Dmitri Shostakovich played by the Borodin Quartet:

Productivity and Creativity

I continue to be amazed at how brilliant Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychology professor who has what seems to be about a million YouTube videos, is in just about every realm you can think of. Here is a video about creativity and Price's Law:

According to Price's law, half of all scientific contributions are made by the square root of the total number of scientific contributors: thus, if there are 100 scientists within a given discipline, just 10 of them will account for 50 percent of all publications. The Price's law describes unequal distribution of productivity in most domains of creativity.

The interesting thing that he points out is that this applies, for example, to companies. If there are ten people in your company, three of them will do half the work. But if there are 100 people in your company, 10 of them will do half the work and if there are 10,000, then only 100 of them will do half the work. Uh-oh! Here is the video:

At the 3:28 mark he talks about composers:

Five composers produce the music that occupies 50% of the classical repertoire: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mozart. Those five. So here's something cool: take all the music those people wrote. 5% of the music all those people wrote occupies 50% of the music that's played.

Now, as one of those people who spends as much energy rationalizing why I'm not writing something as I do actually writing something, I'm really depressed. So I guess I will sit down and actually write something! Best cure for depression.

Here is a piece I recently ran across and found the score for: the Serenade for guitar by Sofia Gubaidulina, a very early piece written in 1960 (her only piece for solo guitar).

And a performance by Patrik Kleemola:

Some Thoughts from Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist who has won a huge internet popularity through posting videos on YouTube that address some of the important issues of the day. Doesn't that sound boring! But not at all. It happens to be the case that if you actually talk about things that are significant, a lot of people simply want you to shut up. The reason is that a great deal of our public discourse is dominated by people who are enslaved by one or another ideology. And as he says in the video I am going to embed below "there are no innocuous ideologies." I want to put this up, even though it might seem to be both too political (though nothing he says is actually in the domain of politics) or too unrelated to the realm of music.

I have a good reason for posting this, though, and that is because some of the ideologies invading the world of music come from another place entirely and it is one that I am far from expert in. Jordan Peterson, on the other hand, has thought through these things pretty thoroughly, so I think that he can be of considerable help to us in this area. I hope you will take the time to watch this video, it is only 25 minutes long and contains a lot of important stuff.

What Artists Do

I had a commentator complaining recently that I always seem to have it in for academia. Well, I often do, yes, and I think they entirely deserve it! But, in point of fact, there are some brilliant and wonderful people in academia, some of whom I had the great priviledge to study and work with. I recall a terrific philosophy professor from my undergraduate days and a truly great violinist from my teaching days. I recently ran across someone that really exemplifies what academia should be, at its finest. This is psychology professor Jordan B. Peterson of the University of Toronto giving an impromptu talk about an artist named Tadeusz Biernot on the occasion of an exhibit of his work in Toronto. In the process he gives a brilliant explanation of who artists are and what they do and why it is so valuable. This clip begins with two and a half minutes introduction to the artist and the exhibit. The rest is the talk by Peterson.

Just about everything in the talk is interesting and unusual. Prof. Peterson recently became very notorious for criticizing new legislation in Ontario that requires that people in many walks of life must use the pronouns that individuals request. He put up a couple of videos pointing out that individual identity is NOT a subjective whim, but a negotiation between the individual and the people that surround him (or do I mean "her"?).

But Peterson is so very much more than a political gadfly. He is a genuinely brilliant scholar who is very learned in myth, philosophy, history and literature. Here is an excerpt from a lecture in which he talks about the mythology of ancient Egypt and what it might mean to us today:

He is a bit Jungian, but knows his Nietzsche as well. He just seems brilliant and very learned in all sorts of areas. Here is a TED talk he gave on, well, what? Being human?